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Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

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Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#121
post #74

The biggest problem that Apple is creating for itself is not one that is being discussed directly in most of these threads: it's not about the loss in Mac sales, which they clearly don't give a damn about. It's the exodus of producers from their platform. Think about it. For those of you that were Mac fans before the iPhone and before it was cool to be so, who else do you know that used a Mac? Forget why, just who? T…

I have to disagree. Completely. First: Your theory isn't new. It's been discussed to death here and elsewhere. Second: There's no evidence that content creators are actually leaving the Mac. It's easy to look at the new machines and Apple's trends and conclude that, but go look on Youtube at any major content creator. FCPX is still popular. If not, Adobe on OSX is still very popular. I'm not suggesting that no one ha…

>But the issues I am describing are not systemic. They are going to be fixed in the next gen model. The pains you're seeing today are just the "early adopter pains" we get with every brand new Apple product.

I don't know what product you are referring to, but we are decidedly not on the same page.

The MacBook Pro is not a "brand new Apple product." It was their bread and butter for a decade. There's nothing "new" about it. The touchbar as an iterative improvement, nothing more. It does not a new product make. If I were complaining about touchbar lag or resolution, you would have every right to make the comments you made and I would defer to them. But I'm not.

Are you trying to tell me that power users use laptops exclusively? Or that the Mac Pro's half-a-decade-old "latest" release is part of this cunning plan and not indicative of systemic failure? How is five years between releases not indicative of systemic abandonment of power users? Even if it's not officially abandoned, it is very much realistically abandoned by any metric that matters, whether you care to admit it or not.

> Apple's Mac sales are not, in _any_ way, propped up by professionals

They're not and I didn't say they are. But they were and I'm saying they will be once more.

> Apple's lack of updates to the Mac Pro has been unfortunate, but hasn't hurt their bottom line.

Yes. That's my point. They've taken "it's not hurting our bottom line" to mean "it won't hurt our bottom line, let's do it some more" and I argue that is the definition of systemic failure.

I laid out a clear pattern that's been developing since the Mac Pro was released in 2012, continuing with the discontinuation of the Mac Server in 2013, and ending with this mess now with the MBP. A pattern is not an isolated incident, it's not a "we goofed up with the last release," it's not a "early adopters are sure to find issues, just give it a time." It's the very definition of a company that has shifted its priorities and does not care about this particular section of the market. I don't see how you can argue about that point - it's clear and no one else is denying it. My comment was arguing the _effects_ of that decision, and whether or not they will continue to drive Apple sales downwards. I argue yes. Others argue no. But there's no point in trying to pretend that Apple still gives a damn about prosumers, because they don't.

Federighi saying during the event releasing the emoji MBP "with the touchpad, you can type faster because the autocorrect pops up right there" is, as they say, the proof in the pudding. Which prosumer types so slow on a keyboard that it would be faster to move your hands away from the keyboard, press the autocomplete, and move them back? Give me a break.

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#122
post #10

Makes sense with Apple's current terrible product line setup. Both the retina MacBook and 2016 MacBook Pro are much more niche than their last generation. Also much more confusing as the MacBook Air successor is $500 more than the 13" Air was (The non-touchbar MacBook Pro is the spiritual successor to the air.) The true 13" Pro for 2016 is also $500 more than the last gen. The 12" MacBook is there...but it is a super…

I have a Retina MacBook next to my sofa in the living room and a 27-inch Retina iMac with 16GB RAM on the desk in my study. At work I have a four year-old 27-inch iMac with all SSD storage and 16GB of RAM. It's still going strong, and I never think it's too slow for anything, despite developing in Scala, which has a slow compiler, and using Intellij or Eclipse, which are resource hogs.

I love them all to death. It doesn't really matter to me whether I could have gotten something cheaper. If I did that, I'd have a little bit more money, and I'd be significantly less happy.

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#123
Back in the 1970s you still had old men who fought in WWII who would refuse to buy a Japanese car, thus, General Motors and Ford abused them because they knew American car buyers would buy American no matter what.

It's the same with Macs today. I gave a talk at my local startup accelerator and found that they had every kind of dongle to attach a Mac to a screen, but no (full size) Displayport adapters.

The next day I added a full-size to mini Displayport adapter to my kit.

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#124
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you want to write fast software, use a slow computer" - Dominic Tarr The 12" Macbook is the best computer I've ever owned. Switched to it from a 2014 Macbook Pro, and found it very easy to adjust. The only time it struggles a little bit is when I run Windows in VMware, on occasion. The biggest benefit of the Macbook 12" is that if software runs well on your computer, you know it's guaranteed to run extra buttery-…

It's a good quote, but I feel it reflects a time when I didn't also need to run a stack of Redis, RabbitMQ, Postgres and webserver apps on my development box.

I run literally all of that, and a couple of virtual machines on my 2016 rMB. It works fine.

Sure, I can't play Doom 4. But if I need extra cycles for my development work, I spin up an ec2 instance.

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#125
post #82

Am I the only one that has issues with the Macbook's WIFI and bluetooth drivers? Granted I am sure the price versus specs differential that keeps expanding my have something to do with. With that said, I am a creature of habit, and stuck in my ways and keep using unix and iOS.

Everything worked decently well for me until I upgraded to macOS.

I can no longer broadcast a wifi network from my computer when connected through ethernet, with no work around.

My Logitech mouse also disconnects whenever I put my computer to sleep and sometimes while I am using it now. It isn't found unless I open up the Bluetooth panel and wait a minute or so until it finally reconnects. It will not reconnect without opening the Bluetooth panel. This is with zero interaction from the mouse, by clicking the connect button, which I avoid anyway since clicking reconnect will just create a new duplicate device right under my mouse. But that is if I'm lucky and Bluetooth hasn't gotten into some weird state where Bluetooth has been turned off by the system and clicking the turn on button does nothing so I have to restart.

The Bluetooth stuff was obviously considered working if Apple products connected and nothing else was tested. My trackpad has no issue connecting to my laptop even when it gets into that weird state where Bluetooth is forced "off" until a reset

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#126
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you want to write fast software, use a slow computer" - Dominic Tarr The 12" Macbook is the best computer I've ever owned. Switched to it from a 2014 Macbook Pro, and found it very easy to adjust. The only time it struggles a little bit is when I run Windows in VMware, on occasion. The biggest benefit of the Macbook 12" is that if software runs well on your computer, you know it's guaranteed to run extra buttery-…

It's a good quote, but I feel it reflects a time when I didn't also need to run a stack of Redis, RabbitMQ, Postgres and webserver apps on my development box.

Why local and not cloud/vps?

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#127
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They claim there's updates in the works. Here's hoping they push them out soon.

With apple's recent behavior, the updates may not be upgrades, but trade-offs.

Seriously. I hope the updates aren't adding more retina screens to more surfaces I don't look at.

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Macbook Airs start at $999. Inflation adds about $120 to your $1k figure since 2009, too.

The cheapest macbook air is a pretty weak laptop. It's very light on specs, compared to similar products. Yes - it's a good piece of kit - but maybe not worth the price. To get decent specs you have to pay a lot for Apple and I think it's becoming a problem.

Yeah I suspect they're starting to overcharge for their greatest strength: their software (macOS/Apple suite of apps).

While I used to fawn over their minimal interface and simple UX, they've been adding a lot of unnecessary noise (siri, itunes forcing apple music, cluttering imessage with extensions) to their products. Definitely straying away from their status quo.

Couple this with the fact they purposely force non-compatibility with anything non-apple and you have them becoming the new Microsoft.

They're changing the things that make Apple great and it isn't worth the price anymore.

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#129
Corrected title: "Mac sales declined nearly 10% as the company failed to release any hardware improvements for several years running, combined with yawn-inducing changes to MacOS 10.whatever, focusing instead on a watch and phones."

Fixed it.

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#130
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you want to write fast software, use a slow computer" - Dominic Tarr The 12" Macbook is the best computer I've ever owned. Switched to it from a 2014 Macbook Pro, and found it very easy to adjust. The only time it struggles a little bit is when I run Windows in VMware, on occasion. The biggest benefit of the Macbook 12" is that if software runs well on your computer, you know it's guaranteed to run extra buttery-…

well.... depends. Apple invests heavily into making sure SW runs lean on metal

Only on newer hardware. Trust me, you don't want to be caught running the latest OS on older Apple hardware because it will run like molasses. If your hardware is the "minimum supported model" or the next most recent, you're better off not upgrading at all.
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